The company said it is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and by the SEC for allegations that some former and current employees paid millions of dollars to win an IT contract with a Russian government agency. The investigations center on a 35-million-euro deal between a former HP subsidiary in Germany and the Russian General Prosecutors Office, and cover a time period beginning in 2001 and ending in 2006. The deal called for the HP subsidiary to install a new IT network at the Russian agency. The disclosure came in HP’s annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

German authorities have indicted four people involved in the deal, including two former and one current HP employee, on charges of bribery, breach of trust and tax evasion. In the U.S., the DOJ has been investigating the deal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In the filing, HP also said that U.S. regulators, as well as those in Mexico and Poland, are investigating other bribery allegations relating to deals with certain public sector agencies in those countries.

HP said in the filing that it is cooperating with all the agencies probing the Russian deal, and is in talks with U.S. authorities to resolve the matter. The investigations first surfaced in 2010.

It has been a tough couple of years for U.S. tech companies coping with bribery cases. Last year, Oracle paid $2 million to settle a case in India. And IBM ran into difficulties with a U.S. judge reviewing its proposed $10 million settlement with the SEC of bribery allegations surrounding dealings in China and South Korea. Earlier this year, authorities in the U.S. launched an investigation into alleged kickbacks by a Microsoft representative in China, and its relationship with resellers in Italy and Romania.

Klarna, the Stockholm-based online payments company, has bought Germany’s Sofort, at a price that sources peg at $150 million.

With the acquisition, Klarna becomes one of the largest independent payments services in Europe, the company said, with about 10 percent market share of the $100 billion European e-commerce market.

“The reason for the acquisition is to do two things: Accelerate the push into Germany, and also to accommodate different needs in different markets,” said Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, which is an investor, in an interview.

Klarna offers payment solutions — such as a one-click purchase option and pay after delivery via anti-fraud technology — for a wide range of online storefronts across Europe; it did $200 million in revenue last year. It has 15 million users and 15,000 merchants in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria.

The purchase of Sofort, which is the major player in Germany, gives Klarna a definitive dominance there. Sofort has 25,000 online shops in Germany, as well as in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Poland and the U.K.

Klarna, which means “clear” in Swedish, has raised $250 million in funding from Sequoia, as well as from DST and General Atlantic.

It will operate the Klarna and Sofort products separately, and the company noted that the deal still needs approval from Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority. The combined company will have about 1,000 employees — 850 at Klarna and 130 at Sofort.

Klarna has yet to enter the more competitive U.S. market, though sources said it is likely to, eventually.

“There will be a variety of large payments-related companies that develop over the next 10 years and ride around the globe,” said Moritz, who is on Klarna’s board. “So it’s a fruitful place to invest, since the two big trends are towards online commerce and the amount of online commerce being done from mobile device.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131218/swedens-klarna-buys-germanys-sofort-for-150-million/feed/0Amazon's German Workers to Protest in Seattlehttp://allthingsd.com/20131216/amazons-german-workers-to-protest-in-seattle/
http://allthingsd.com/20131216/amazons-german-workers-to-protest-in-seattle/#commentsMon, 16 Dec 2013 10:50:17 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=378907Representatives of Amazon.com Inc. workers in Germany will take their beef with the e-commerce giant to the U.S. Monday, staging a protest at the retailer’s Seattle headquarters in tandem with strikes planned at Amazon sites in Germany.

This is the first time the union has taken a German wage dispute outside the country to a corporation’s doorstep, Mechthild Middeke of the services union Ver.di said. At the same time, she stressed the U.S. action is symbolic.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131209/deutsche-post-tests-drone-deliveries/feed/0Tesla Model S No Fire Hazard, Says German Auto Authorityhttp://allthingsd.com/20131203/tesla-model-s-no-fire-hazard-says-germany-auto-authority/
http://allthingsd.com/20131203/tesla-model-s-no-fire-hazard-says-germany-auto-authority/#commentsTue, 03 Dec 2013 16:34:00 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=376250The first of two investigations into impact-related fires in Tesla’s Model S has concluded, and it’s good news for the electric-car maker.

The German Federal Motor Transport Authority — essentially the Teutonic version of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — this week cleared the Model S of any role in the fires, saying no manufacturer-related defects could be found.

That clean bill of health from German auto-safety authorities follows three separate accidents in Mexico, Tennessee and Washington state, in which a Model S caught fire following a collision. The incidents have weighed heavily on Tesla’s share price, and elicited a vehement defense from founder and CEO Elon Musk, who has argued that fires in gasoline-powered cars occur far more often.

“Why does a Tesla fire w no injury get more media headlines than 100,000 gas car fires that kill 100s of people per year?” Musk said in a late-November tweet. “… What makes this incredibly unjust is that the Model S to date has the best safety record of any car on the road (no injuries or deaths ever).”

With the completion of the German probe, only the NHTSA investigation remains open. No word yet on when its findings will be released, but it’s worth noting that the agency has already given Tesla a top safety rating. And if it does find a flaw, Musk has pledged to fix it. “If NHTSA identifies an improvement that would materially improve safety, it will be implemented at no cost to all cars,” he said.

Antitrust authorities began investigating Amazon earlier this year over a price parity policy it applied to third-party sellers. A clause in the agreement with sellers banned them from offering their products for a lower price on other platforms, such as eBay Inc. or the sellers’ own online shops.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131125/amazon-workers-in-germany-strike/feed/0The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Is Still in Chinahttp://allthingsd.com/20131118/the-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputer-is-still-in-china/
http://allthingsd.com/20131118/the-worlds-most-powerful-supercomputer-is-still-in-china/#commentsMon, 18 Nov 2013 12:30:50 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=373202Today is that twice-a-year day when the world pays attention to big iron. The latest edition of the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers is released, coinciding with a conference being held in Denver.

The main thing you need to know is that the most powerful system in the world is the same one that topped the list in June: The Tianhe-2. It’s a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, and it is capable of running at 33.86 petaflops. (A petaflop is a quadrillion* calculations per second.)

This supercomputer may be in China, but it’s packed with a lot of American-made chips. Specifically, Intel chips. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each of them containing two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge-generation processors and another three Xeon Phi processors, which adds up to a combined total of 3.12 million computing engines all being harnessed to work at once.

Unless you work with one of these machines, there’s not much reason to give a lot of thought to them in daily life. But they’re performing a lot of important functions from which you probably derive some indirect benefit. One of the systems on the list is involved in predicting the weather for the U.S. National Weather Service. Others may be helping a bank keep track of your money, or mapping genomes, designing drugs, or using complex mathematical algorithms to simulate all manner of complex things, from the planet’s climate to nuclear explosions.

There was no change among the Top 5 systems on the list from June.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, remained the No. 2 most-powerful machine. Capable of 17.59 petaflops, it uses 261,632 Nvidia-made K20x accelerator cores as its computing backbone. And, while it may have only about half the computing oomph of its Chinese rival, it’s the second most power-efficient system on the list, consuming only 8.21 megawatts to Tianhe-2’s 17.8. Titan was the reigning world computing champ before Tianhe-2.

At No. 3, again, is Sequoia, an IBM-made BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. No. 4 is Riken, a Fujitsu-made machine in Japan that topped two years ago this month. No. 5: Mira, an IBM machine at the DOE’s Argonne National Lab.

The highest-debuting new entry on the list is Piz Daint, at No. 6. A Cray XC30 installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland, it’s the most powerful machine in Europe, and is the most-energy-efficient one in the top 10. It, too, has a lot of Nvidia’s K20x accelerator chips powering it: 5,272 of them to be exact, making for a total of 73,808 cores.

At No. 7 is a Dell-made machine called Stampede, installed the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin. In June, it was No. 6. The next three machines rounding out the Ttop 10 — two of them in Germany, and one in the U.S. — were all made by IBM.

By way of measuring the march of supercomputing progress in the last six months, here are a few other highlights from the overall list to chew on. There are now 31 machines that can boast top performance of one petaflop or better, up from 26 on the list in June. And the entry point — the minimum performance required to make it onto the list — is 117.8 teraflops, up from 96.3 six months ago.

Intel chips are by far the most popular computing engine used in the systems on the list, showing up in 412 of the 500, or 82 percent. Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices were in 43 systems. IBM’s Power chips were in 40 systems. Nvidia’s GPU-based accelerator chips show up 38 systems.

Hewlett-Packard sold more of the systems on the list than anyone, accounting for 195, or 39 percent, of the 500. IBM was second, with 166 systems. If you added up the total computing performance of all the systems from each vendor, HP would rank fourth, while IBM would rank first.

Geographically, the U.S. is still the supercomputing leader, and is home to 265 of the systems on the list, up from 253 six months ago. Europe was second with 102, down from 112. China had 63, and Japan 28.

This is the 42nd time this list has been put out. It’s a joint project run by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. You can see the full list here.

The list pretty much covers the waterfront in listing the supercomputers publicly known to exist around the world. For the most part, the universities and other entities that have them, like to brag about their position on the list when they can. What the list doesn’t cover are the secret machines that might be used by government agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency and similar government spy shops around the world. One wonders if there’s information about just such a machine in the files of Edward Snowden.

* Quadrillions come after trillions, in case you hadn’t been keeping track.

(A small correction: I initially said Titan — number two — was the most energy-efficient system. It’s actually Piz Daint, number six.)

Three of Germany’s largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom AG, teamed up to offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The companies promise that by encrypting email through German servers and hewing to the country’s strict privacy laws, U.S. authorities won’t easily be able to pry inside. More than a hundred thousand Germans have flocked to the service since it was rolled out in August.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130928/nsa-internet-spying-sparks-race-to-create-offshore-havens-for-data-privacy/feed/0Hacker Hits Vodafone in Germanyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130913/hacker-hits-vodafone-in-germany/
http://allthingsd.com/20130913/hacker-hits-vodafone-in-germany/#commentsFri, 13 Sep 2013 21:45:52 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=358207Vodafone Group PLC’s German unit said Thursday the personal data of two million customers were compromised by a hacker who broke into one of its servers and stole data on customers’ names, bank codes, account numbers, addresses and birth dates.

“Vodafone discovered and stopped the attack, and quickly filed charges,” Vodafone said. “The attack was only possible due to…insider knowledge, and occurred deep in the company’s IT infrastructure,” it said. No country other than Germany has been affected.

A suspect has been identified and German law enforcement has searched his home. He worked for an external service provider and had access to Vodafone data, but was hacking into the server to obtain the information, said a spokesman.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of some of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

Late on Monday, Microsoft announced that it would spend $7.17 billion to buy the majority of Nokia’s cellphone unit. Nokia’s stock price has fallen precipitously since 2007, but news of the deal sent Nokia shares up and Microsoft shares down. John Paczkowski broke down the full deal by the numbers.

So, just how did the mega-deal come to pass? As Ina Fried reported this week, the inside story of the purchase started with just three words: “Can we talk?”

The Microkia deal also brought multiple Nokia execs into Microsoft, including Stephen Elop — who, as Kara Swisher argues, is now “in the front of the line to take over the software giant” after current CEO Steve Ballmer retires.

In other acquisition news, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten continued a recent pattern of aggressive expansion by buying Viki, a Hulu-like video site, for $200 million.

After months of rumors, leaks and finally some official confirmation last week, Samsung unveiled its smartwatch, a watch that acts as a companion to a smartphone, the Galaxy Gear. The move puts Samsung ahead of most of the field (including Apple) in the race to get such a product in front of consumers, although in a surprising twist, Qualcomm announced its own smartwatch, the Toq, on the same day.

The first of those cities, Beijing, is a reminder of how increasingly important China is for the iPhone. With more than 700 million subscribers, China Mobile is the largest wireless carrier in the world, and the companies seem to have finally come to a deal, with word of less-expensive iPhones (which industry watchers call the iPhone 5C) ready to ship to China Mobile’s subscribers.

After a 30-day rollout campaign, Yahoo finally settled on its new logo, which “kind of looks like it is a little hungry all the time, like some supermodel in a Vogue magazine spread.” The company may be settled, but the Internet is not, and has generated multiple alternatives that Yahoo could have chosen instead.

Whisper may sounds like just another mobile-social startup, but VCs are dumping money into it and the company is reporting rapid growth — here’s why you should care.

And lastly, eBay acquired Decide.com, a price-forecasting startup. The company’s 26 employees will be moving into one of eBay’s offices, and Decide will shut down at the end of this month.

On Sept. 10, Apple will hold a special event at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, at which it is expected to unveil its next-generation iPhones. And a few hours later, it will hold three more events at a trio of international locations.

These satellite launches will be held in Berlin, Tokyo and Beijing, and will feature a video stream or more time-zone-friendly replay of the Cupertino event, along with some other content. They’re not an entirely new occurrence; Apple has done them before in London and Tokyo. That said, this is the first time the company has ever held a satellite launch event in China, one of its most important markets. And its scheduling will almost certainly add heft to rumors that Apple is preparing to announce China Mobile as a new carrier partner in the country.

With more than 700 million customers, China Mobile is not only the largest wireless carrier in China, but in the world. And, as I wrote this morning, it’s one of the few remaining carriers that can significantly move the needle on iPhone sales. With Apple’s revenue in China down 14 percent year over year in the third quarter, that’s something the company is likely eager to do.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130904/apple-will-hold-satellite-iphone-events-in-beijing-berlin-and-tokyo/feed/0PlayStation 4 Will Be Released on November 15, Xbox One Release Date Still MIAhttp://allthingsd.com/20130820/playstation-4-will-be-released-on-november-15-xbox-one-release-date-still-mia/
http://allthingsd.com/20130820/playstation-4-will-be-released-on-november-15-xbox-one-release-date-still-mia/#commentsTue, 20 Aug 2013 19:08:04 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=352218Sony’s next-gen console, the PlayStation 4, will be released on Nov. 15 in the U.S. and Nov. 29 in Europe, the company announced today at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.

“Our goals for the PS4 are clear, ambitious and unwavering,” said Andrew House, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. “We set out to build the most powerful gaming platform with a deeply held, consistent focus on you, the gamer … I’m delighted to say that PlayStation 4 will be launching in 32 countries this holiday season.”

At its Gamescom press conference last night, Microsoft notably did not announce a specific release date for its own next-gen console, the Xbox One, and representatives did not respond to a request for comment regarding availability. The company has previously said it is planned for release sometime in November.

(Incidentally, at EA’s Gamescom event, the company announced that Need For Speed: Rivals, which is a launch title for the Xbox One, will debut on Nov. 21. Oops? It’s certainly possible that that’s the Xbox One date, too, but, as GameInformer’s Mike Futter pointed out, these game dates can move around.)

The precise release dates of the two consoles don’t matter much. Their oft-at-war attendant fans are a built-in audience; undecided gamers who are only getting one or the other will pick based on the launch titles, and non-gamers may be drawn to media and social apps. Yawn.

But the race to announce a release date is more interesting on a bigger-picture level. Unlike the previous generation, in which the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had nearly a year between their initial release dates, these consoles are coming out within a month of one another. How they perform relative to each other — and if one or the other flops — will be a barometer for the health of console gaming, since overall gaming hardware, software and accessory sales have been on the decline for months.

Sony also announced that the Wi-Fi version of its handheld console, the PS Vita, would be getting a $50 price cut to $199, which puts the Vita within the price range of its main rival, the Nintendo 3DS. Twitch, the game-recording and streaming-video service, will be baked into the PS4 at launch. That means that in addition to a previously announced partnership with Ustream, players who want to stream PS4 games will be able to choose to use the more hardcore-gamer-focused Twitch, instead.

Both Microsoft and Sony pledged their commitment to indie developers at Gamescom, teased dozens of games and made sure to play to their European audiences. One of the first games previewed at the Sony event was the car-racing game Gran Turismo 6, while Microsoft said that any Europeans who preorder the Xbox One will get a free copy of FIFA 14.

As announced at E3, the PS4 will cost $399; the Xbox One, which is bundled with a Kinect motion sensor, will cost $499.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130820/playstation-4-will-be-released-on-november-15-xbox-one-release-date-still-mia/feed/0Samsung to Buy Germany's Novaled, Raising Bet on Next-Generation Screenshttp://allthingsd.com/20130730/samsung-to-buy-germanys-novaled-raising-bet-on-next-generation-screens/
http://allthingsd.com/20130730/samsung-to-buy-germanys-novaled-raising-bet-on-next-generation-screens/#commentsTue, 30 Jul 2013 19:40:07 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=347404Samsung Group is poised to acquire German lighting specialist Novaled AG, raising its bet on increasing demand for displays that use next-generation technology, people close to the matter said.

The people said South Korea’s biggest conglomerate has offered more than $200 million, valuing Dresden-based Novaled at around 10 times its total revenue of €17 million ($22.5 million) in 2011, the most recent year for which the company has provided financial data.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130730/samsung-to-buy-germanys-novaled-raising-bet-on-next-generation-screens/feed/0Antiques for Geeks: Christie's Auctions Vintage Apple Computershttp://allthingsd.com/20130706/antiques-for-geeks-christies-auctions-vintage-apple-computers/
http://allthingsd.com/20130706/antiques-for-geeks-christies-auctions-vintage-apple-computers/#commentsSun, 07 Jul 2013 00:39:04 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=339594As legend has it, the first Apple computers were made in 1976 in the garage belonging to Steve Jobs’s parents. Of that run of roughly 200 Apple 1s, only a few working models remain. One is currently up for auction at Christie’s.

The machines originally sold for $666.66 (Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak was reportedly fond of repeating numbers). Christie’s estimates that the model on auction — which includes the manual, a printout of the computer’s schematics and a signed photograph of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak — may fetch up to $500,000. Another functioning Apple 1 offered with different accessories sold in May for 420,000 euros, or about $546,000, through Auction Team Breker in Germany.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130706/antiques-for-geeks-christies-auctions-vintage-apple-computers/feed/0Vodafone Launches Bid for Kabel Deutschlandhttp://allthingsd.com/20130624/vodafone-launches-bid-for-kabel-deutschland/
http://allthingsd.com/20130624/vodafone-launches-bid-for-kabel-deutschland/#commentsMon, 24 Jun 2013 10:53:51 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=336037Vodafone Group PLC Monday launched a formal €7.7 billion ($10.1 billion) cash offer for Germany’s biggest cable operator Kabel Deutschland Holding AG,signaling its ambitions to grow in Europe again with its biggest acquisition there in more than a decade and laying down a challenge to John Malone’s international cable company Liberty Global Inc.

Vodafone put forward an all-cash offer of €87 a share, made up of €84.50 for the company and a previously announced €2.50 dividend. Kabel Deutschland management and supervisory boards intend to recommend the deal to shareholders who now have four to 10 weeks to tender their shares according to German takeover law. At least 75 percent of Kabel Deutschland shareholders must accept Vodafone’s offer for the deal to go ahead.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130624/vodafone-launches-bid-for-kabel-deutschland/feed/0China Retakes Supercomputing Crown With a Lot of American Chipshttp://allthingsd.com/20130617/china-retakes-supercomputing-crown-with-a-lot-of-american-chips/
http://allthingsd.com/20130617/china-retakes-supercomputing-crown-with-a-lot-of-american-chips/#commentsMon, 17 Jun 2013 18:57:08 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=333079The latest edition of the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is out today, and a machine in China has retaken the crown from the United States.

The machine is nicknamed Milky Way 2, but is formally known as Tianhe-2, (the word translates literally as “Sky River”), and was built at China’s National University of Defense Technology. In taking the top spot, it knocked Titan, a machine built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, off its perch.

Now, before any of you reading in the U.S. get all bummed about the decline of American technical superiority, consider this: Its main computing engine was made in America. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each containing two Intel-made Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, bringing the total number of computing cores to 3.12 million.

Its total performance is 33.86 petaflops, which means it can conduct 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. I’ll write that number out so you can see all the zeros: 33,860,000,000,000,000. That’s almost twice — but not quite — as powerful as Titan, which can do 17.59 petaflops. Titan runs on 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

This is the second time that a Chinese machine has topped the list, which is updated twice a year. The first was in 2010, when the Tianhe-1A system at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin took the crown, and did so with a relatively quaint — by today’s standard — 2.57 petaflops.

China’s dominance was short-lived the first time around: Japan nabbed the title with a Fujitsu-made machine in late 2011.

American machines have dominated on subsequent Top 500 lists, until today. A year ago, an IBM-made machine called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, held the top spot. It’s now No. 3. Titan took the title in November.

A few more facts about the new list: There are now 26 machines that have a computing capacity north of one petaflop, up from 23 on the last list. Some 54 machines are using graphical processing units from the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Intel to boost their computing oomph, down from 62 on the last list.

And while it may not have the fastest computer in the world, the U.S. leads the world in total supercomputing capacity: Of the machines on the Top 500 list, 252 are in the U.S.; 112 are in Europe, with 29 in the U.K., 23 in France and 19 in Germany; 66 are in China; and 30 are in Japan.

The Top 500 list (which you can see in full here) is compiled twice every year by Hans Meuer at Germany’s University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130617/china-retakes-supercomputing-crown-with-a-lot-of-american-chips/feed/0HP Names Heiko Meyer New Enterprise Head in Germanyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130610/hp-names-heiko-meyer-new-enterprise-head-in-germany/
http://allthingsd.com/20130610/hp-names-heiko-meyer-new-enterprise-head-in-germany/#commentsMon, 10 Jun 2013 18:51:26 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=330625Tech giant Hewlett-Packard is shaking up management of its enterprise operations in Germany. Last week, the company announced internally that it had named Heiko Meyer as VP of HP’s Enterprise group in that country. He replaces Volker Smid, who had held the post since 2009 and is leaving HP. Meyer, who joined HP in 1984, will report to Peter Ryan, who was named to run HP’s Enterprise business in Europe last year, after a wider reorganization.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130610/hp-names-heiko-meyer-new-enterprise-head-in-germany/feed/0SAP Vaults Into Top Three E-Commerce Players With Hybris Buyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130605/sap-vaults-into-top-three-e-commerce-players-with-hybris-buy/
http://allthingsd.com/20130605/sap-vaults-into-top-three-e-commerce-players-with-hybris-buy/#commentsWed, 05 Jun 2013 19:47:08 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=329344German software giant SAP said it will acquire Hybris, a privately held e-commerce software company based in Switzerland.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but educated guesses put the value of the deal at between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. Hybris is known primarily for competing with IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Suite and Oracle’s Commerce Suite. And it’s also worth noting that the deal is taking place a week after Netsuite, the cloud business software player, said it was getting into the “commerce as a service” business and announced a big customer win with Williams Sonoma.

Analyst Karl Keirstead of BMO Capital Markets, in a note sent to clients earlier today, said he was positive on the acquisition. “Demand for new commerce platforms appears to be robust and the space is attracting new entrants,” he wrote. SAP, he said, had previously struggled to get any traction in e-commerce, and the acquisition essentially puts it among the top three players, along with Oracle and IBM. Also, most of Hybris’ clients are in Europe.

Keirstead raised his revenue estimate for SAP to 17.5 billion euros (about $23 billion) for 2013 and left his EPS estimate at 3.48 euros, or $4.56 a share.

At issue here are a pair of cases born out of autocomplete searches that associated individuals with words like “Scientology” and “fraud,” and “prostitute” and “escort.” Google insists it has no control over autocomplete suggestions, which are automatically generated according to the frequency of keyword searches. And while the court agreed, it determined that the company has an obligation to remove defamatory suggestions when they are brought to its attention.

“We are disappointed with the decision from the German Supreme Court,” a Google spokesman said. “We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself. We are waiting for the written grounds to review the decision in detail.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130514/auto-ban-german-court-orders-google-to-delete-offensive-search-suggestions/feed/0German Court Slams Apple on Privacyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130507/german-court-slams-apple-on-privacy/
http://allthingsd.com/20130507/german-court-slams-apple-on-privacy/#commentsTue, 07 May 2013 18:09:23 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=319107Apple’s customer privacy policies don’t jibe with Germany’s consumer privacy protection laws, and the country wants them changed so that they do.

In a Tuesday ruling, the Berlin Regional Court declared eight of the 15 clauses in Apple’s data use policy invalid because they don’t comply with German law, and forbade the company from doing things like asking customers for “global consent” to use their data.

Since Apple had already agreed to abandon the other seven clauses earlier this year, the court’s ruling means the company now has to either adjust its privacy policy to accommodate Germany’s requirements, develop an entirely new one specific to the country, or prevail on its likely inevitable appeal of the ruling. Apple declined comment.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130507/german-court-slams-apple-on-privacy/feed/0German City of Hamburg Fines Google Over Street View Servicehttp://allthingsd.com/20130422/german-city-of-hamburg-fines-google-over-street-view-service/
http://allthingsd.com/20130422/german-city-of-hamburg-fines-google-over-street-view-service/#commentsMon, 22 Apr 2013 18:44:49 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=314430The commissioner for data protection of the German city of Hamburg said Monday he has fined Google Inc. for violating privacy law when collecting data for its Street View service.

Commissioner Johannes Caspar ordered the U.S. Internet company to pay 145,000 euros ($189,000) for collecting data of private Wi-Fi networks when Google’s cars drove through the streets to take pictures from 2008 until 2010.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130422/german-city-of-hamburg-fines-google-over-street-view-service/feed/0HP Negotiating Early End to San Jose Arena Naming Rights Dealhttp://allthingsd.com/20130326/hp-negotiating-early-end-to-san-jose-arena-naming-rights-deal/
http://allthingsd.com/20130326/hp-negotiating-early-end-to-san-jose-arena-naming-rights-deal/#commentsTue, 26 Mar 2013 18:20:06 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=306745Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest technology company by revenue, is in advanced negotiations to prematurely end its naming rights deal on the San Jose, Calif., sports arena currently known as the HP Pavilion, the home of the National Hockey League’s San Jose Sharks.

Sources familiar with the negotiations tell AllThingsD that HP CEO Meg Whitman wants out of the $47 million, 15-year naming rights deal, which is scheduled to end in 2016. The move is part of a global reevaluation by HP of its marketing efforts and sponsorships. The change could be announced as early as this summer, in time for the 2013-14 hockey season.

Software giant SAP is said to be interested in taking over the naming rights. Its founder, former co-CEO and chairman of its supervisory board, Hasso Plattner, is the majority owner of the Sharks. Plattner, who ranks at No. 122 on the Forbes magazine list of global billionaires, with a net worth of $8.9 billion, recently bought out two other co-owners, the longtime Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Kevin Compton, and former VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos. Following that deal, Plattner’s stake in the team is said to be in the neighborhood of 90 percent.

HP spokesman Michael Thacker declined to comment, as did SAP spokesman James Dever.

A change in the arena’s naming rights would have to be approved by the San Jose city council. Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, had no immediate comment. Update, 4:50 PM PDT: I just received a statement from McGurk. See it below.

Scott Emmert, a spokesman for the San Jose Sharks, didn’t immediately return messages seeking a comment.

According to people familiar with the discussions, Plattner raised the issue of HP’s naming rights with Whitman directly during a routine meeting. HP is a significant SAP customer. Asked if HP intended to hold on to its naming rights through 2016 as the current agreement states, Whitman said, “Frankly, I’d like to get out of it.”

HP inherited the naming rights from Compaq, the computer company it acquired in 2002 for $25 billion. At the time, San Jose’s arena was known as The Compaq Center at San Jose. It has been known as the HP Pavilion at San Jose since late 2002. The rights are said to cost HP about $3.1 million a year.

As annual expenditures go, $3.1 million is pocket change for HP. While it doesn’t disclose marketing expenditures directly, those expenses fall under the “selling, general and administrative” (SG&A) line item on HP’s income statement, which in fiscal 2012 was $13.5 billion.

Still, since Whitman took over as CEO in 2011, marketing functions that had previously been run by HP’s disparate business units — the PC unit, the printer unit and so on — have been centralized under Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish.

Over the years, HP has become involved with hundreds, if not thousands, of events and programs that it sponsors as a way of raising the visibility of the HP brand. Those programs and sponsorships are now in the process of being systematically reevaluated, and many are being canceled outright.

The HP Pavilion name was given to the arena to align with the company’s main PC brand, known as Pavilion. But with personal computer sales in rapid decline, attaching the brand name to a sporting facility is no longer seen as an effective use of marketing dollars, people familiar with HP’s thinking say. Money saved from canceled marketing efforts is being redirected into either new marketing efforts or into HP’s research and development budget.

HP will still have access to the arena and to San Jose Sharks games. Sources say the company intends to hold on to a single luxury box it owns to entertain customers. Oddly enough, the naming rights for the luxury suites belong to another tech company: They’re currently known as Citrix Suites.

Informally known as the Shark Tank, the arena seats 17,562 for hockey games, and more than 19,000 for concerts. It hosts as many as 190 events a year, including the SAP Open, a men’s tennis tournament. It was briefly the home court of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors during a period when the Oakland Coliseum was under reconstruction.

Update: Here’s the statement I just got from Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed:

“We’ve enjoyed a long and productive partnership with both the Sharks and HP, and we greatly appreciate their long-standing and valuable commitment to our community.

“The current agreement is scheduled to end in 2016, so we would be starting a process in the coming year or so to explore contract alternatives in the normal course of business.

“Because the Arena is an outstanding facility and Silicon Valley a unique location, we’re optimistic that we will be able to end up in position of mutual benefit for everyone, without speculating on any specific outcome.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130326/hp-negotiating-early-end-to-san-jose-arena-naming-rights-deal/feed/0German Government Goes BlackBerry 10http://allthingsd.com/20130305/german-government-goes-blackberry-10/
http://allthingsd.com/20130305/german-government-goes-blackberry-10/#commentsTue, 05 Mar 2013 12:00:56 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=300377BlackBerry may be losing favor with someU.S. governmentagencies, but the company is drumming up new business abroad.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) this week approved a deal under which the country’s government will purchase 5,000 BlackBerry Z10s for employee use. The devices are all to be outfitted with Secusmart technology, which will bring to them additional security measures like data encryption and secure voice and text messaging.

The deal is a nice win for BlackBerry, which over the past few years has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now, with its new BlackBerry 10 operating system and devices like the Z10, the company is doing all it can to retain those bread-and-butter enterprise customers. This contract with the German government is an encouraging sign that some of those efforts are paying off.

But it’s a tough battle. As I’ve written here before, BlackBerry’s fight for the enterprise space is beginning to look a lot like the one already lost in the consumer space.

With the consumerization of IT in full swing, and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” plans to their employees, BlackBerry is losing its grip on enterprise. By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, the company has put its position in the enterprise market at risk. Now it must struggle for relevance in a broader market in which the lines between consumer and enterprise are blurring. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that has only recently fielded a competitive smartphone OS.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130305/german-government-goes-blackberry-10/feed/0iMac Ship Times Improve -- If You Live in the U.S.http://allthingsd.com/20130304/imac-ship-times-improve-if-you-live-in-the-united-states/
http://allthingsd.com/20130304/imac-ship-times-improve-if-you-live-in-the-united-states/#commentsMon, 04 Mar 2013 12:00:27 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=299969Over the weekend, the shipping window for Apple’s new 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs narrowed to one to three days from two to three weeks. A dramatic improvement for machines that have been in tight supply since they debuted, but one that’s limited geographically. For, while iMac availability is improving in the U.S., overseas it’s another matter entirely.

Outside the U.S., iMac shipping windows remain at a week or more. In France and the U.K., they’re five to seven business days for the 21.5-inch models and one to two weeks for the 27-inch models. In Germany, the window is two weeks for both models. And in Japan, the 21.5-inch models ship in two to three weeks, and the 27-inch models in three to four weeks. So, overseas, iMac availability clearly remains somewhat constrained.

Why the intercontinental disparity in shipping windows? Simple: Apple has amassed enough North American inventory to meet expected demand. But this is true only of the iMac’s four standard models. The addition of any customization, even if it’s simply swapping in a trackpad for a mouse, pushes the device’s ship time back out to two to three weeks. Outside the U.S., the story is the same as it has been to date. IMac supplies still aren’t at the level Apple wants. As CEO Tim Cook noted on the company’s last earnings call, “We left the quarter with significant constraints on the iMac. … We are confident that we are going to significantly increase the supply. But the demand here is very strong, and we are not certain that we will achieve a supply-demand balance during the quarter.”

That remains the case today, as these varied shipping windows demonstrate. Which is not to say that Apple isn’t making headway. It is. As I noted here recently, Mac sales rose 31 percent year over year for the month of January, according to NPD, and the reason was likely improved iMac availability. But again, that was in the U.S. To reach supply-demand equilibrium overseas, Apple has to ramp up iMac production even more.